Patrick Barron Hopkirk (14 April 1933 – 21 July 2022) was a rally driver from Northern Ireland. Hopkirk was appointed MBE in the 2016 New Year Honours list. In early 2016, Hopkirk became the IAM RoadSmart Mature Drivers Ambassador. Early life Hopkirk was born in Belfast, raised as a Catholic, and educated at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare from 1945 to 1949 before attending Trinity College, Dublin until 1953. However his academic career was held back by his dyslexia. Hopkirk first learned the basics of car control at the age of nine, when a local clergyman left him his invalid carriage in his will. He later graduated to a motorcycle with a sidecar - which was added at the insistence of his father, who felt it would be safer - and upon attending Trinity to study engineering, acquired an Austin 7 "Chummy" Tourer which he used to make his rally debut. Now bitten by the car bug, Hopkirk dropped out of university to start working for Dublin's Volkswagen assembler's retail operation in Ballsbridge, where he purchased a string of used Volkswagen Beetles to enter in competitions. Earlier wins and Monte Carlo Rally victory Hopkirk's first win came in 1953 at the Cairncastle hillclimb at the wheel of a V.W. Beetle, reg no EI 5756. He was offered a free Beetle for the 1953 Circuit of Ireland by Isaac Agnew of Belfast. It would be the first of many Circuit entries: the following year he led the Circuit on the first day of the competition. Hopkirk started his winning career in professional racing and rally driving in 1955, taking a class win at that year's Circuit of Ireland, and clinching his first Hewison Trophy, awarded to the most successful Irish rally driver of the year: he would go on to win the Trophy for three consecutive years. By this time he had graduated to a Triumph TR2. His success in the Triumph was noticed by the Standard Motor Company, who offered Hopkirk his first factory drive in a Standard Ten at the 1956 RAC Rally in March of that year, where he took the early lead before suffering problems later on. Two months later he took a Standard Eight to third place in the Tulip Rally in the Netherlands - his first trip outside of Britain and Ireland. However he lost his drive with Standard in 1958, after overdriving his